The MAS, the ruling party in Bolivia led by president Evo Morales, is generally labeled as populist or revolutionary. This paper challenges both diagnosis and sustains that the MAS is a social democratic party. Both in its genesis and in its behaviour in opposition, as well as in its policies in government, the MAS presents all the sufficient traits to be labeled as representative of social democracy. In order to dispute the dominant diagnosis in literature, the argument is developed applying three different approaches on social democracy: a historical-ideological comparison with parties which use to be labeled as social democratic, an institutional analysis of what the MAS has done both in opposition and after getting in the Presidency, and an evaluation of party's policies in government. A comparison to non controversial cases of social democracy shows that the MAS resembles them both in its strongly unionist origin and in the kind of changes it introduced in the country. The accusations that the MAS is anti-systemic and opposes democracy, traits which are associated both to "populists", according to the "authors of the two lefts", and to parties that favor the "violent revolution", are refused by the institutional analysis. Finally, evaluating the policies from the MAS in government we can see that they are in line with those which are considered social democratic in the scope of the integration of global markets. This paper challenges current literature calling attention to some aspects usually neglected by scholars. In the text, it is argued that the MAS does not use to be labeled as social democratic partially due to misunderstanding of what it does and partially due to a tendency to call attention to what is specific to the movement and not to what is similar to other leftwing parties, as it is done with all parties when we classify them inside families.
MAS; social democracy; Bolivia; political parties; democracy
